Just installed Bea, and the look is definitely better than Ubuntu, and I like that the repositories are set up so that I can use the apps that I want. I prefer FOSS apps when they exist. But unfortunately there are a few proprietary items that are necessary to get things done right.

Here are some issues I've run into. They may or may not be issues for other people. I have also included a work-around if I know of one.

Hellanzb. Where is it? I love this program. It is in the Debian repositories. I thought it was also in the Ubuntu repositories. Maybe I'm wrong.

OpenOffice Base. I want this app. Why is it not included?

Flash 9 Beta 2 makes Firefox crash very frequently. I've uninstalled it. I hate Flash ads, but I like to watch videos on YouTube. So instead of replacing it with the stable Flash (Flash 7), I installed the Firefox extension "Video Downloader". This lets you download and view Flash videos from YouTube and a few other sites without even having Flash installed. Pretty nice.

CNN Video doesn't work. I don't have an answer for this. But it's not crucial.

msttcorefonts - IMHO this should be part of the default install. It legally downloads several Microsoft fonts, which improve compatibility for certain websites (CNN especially) and Word documents opened in OpenOffice. Workaround: install it yourself with Synaptic and restart Firefox and OpenOffice.

Works perfectly here. I use the mplayer-plugin. CNN will first give me a "Plugin Warning", e.g. that Windows Media Player is not installed ... of course it isn't. I am not even using Windows Clicking onto "Continue to Video" will load the mplayer-plugin and CNN's videos will then play without problem.

A CD can only contain 700MB of compressed data. Not everybody needs a database application on their desktop.

When OpenOffice was chosen as the default office suite for Linux Mint two facts came to my attention: the whole suite takes a lot of space and only two of its applications are used a lot by people (word processing and spreadsheet).

In Bea a third application was added simply because people do receive a lot of PPT jokes by email.. from their friends who are still running Windows. And so they need a way to "read" those files.

clem wrote:A CD can only contain 700MB of compressed data. Not everybody needs a database application on their desktop.

When OpenOffice was chosen as the default office suite for Linux Mint two facts came to my attention: the whole suite takes a lot of space and only two of its applications are used a lot by people (word processing and spreadsheet).

In Bea a third application was added simply because people do receive a lot of PPT jokes by email.. from their friends who are still running Windows. And so they need a way to "read" those files.

Clem

I beg to differ, base is very much in demand and Open Office is a suite.

So why not just have the full version available in the repositories and why isn't it available?

1. the embedded streaming player needs to be changed from mplayer to a realplayer plugin
2. needs something like wine embedded in MINT to so we can play play WINDOWS games on our MINT if we want to
3. Needs something like alien included to help MINT users translate RPM files to debian packages

this lastest distribition Bianca MINT 2.2 is great ! i love it! if you can get around to the above suggestions would be even better...!

i wasnt sure how to use the mplayer plugin but now i have the info i need from the above posts!

yes i know about cedega but its not free, but i will consider it in the future.
Obviously...to develop software costs money$ maybe in the future the people from Mint will consider a non free version with all these things pre installed.
for people who want this from the get go.

ccc771 wrote:i wasnt sure how to use the mplayer plugin but now i have the info i need from the above posts!

mplayer has been around for a long time and really is great. Another one you might look at is vlc.

ccc771 wrote:yes i know about cedega but its not free, but i will consider it in the future.

It's about $5 a month, I've tried it from time to time but I usually bag it. It does a fair job, but I'm not overly impressed. It really comes down to if you want more of the mainstream games get an Xbox, Playstation, etc.. Until more main stream game companies start porting to Linux we're kind of stuck. There are few decent games out there, but few and far between

ccc771 wrote:Obviously...to develop software costs money$ maybe in the future the people from Mint will consider a non free version with all these things pre installed.for people who want this from the get go.

scorp123 wrote:Works perfectly here. I use the mplayer-plugin. CNN will first give me a "Plugin Warning", e.g. that Windows Media Player is not installed ... of course it isn't. I am not even using Windows Clicking onto "Continue to Video" will load the mplayer-plugin and CNN's videos will then play without problem.

I can't get the video to work. I click on the "continue button and all I get is sound. What else can I try? BTW, I did follow Alephcat's instructions on how to get BBC and CNN video working, but I sacrificed the ability to see other video with MPlayer. I didn't know how to undo, so I reinstalled Mint.

antiquexray wrote:I can't get the video to work. I click on the "continue button and all I get is sound. What else can I try? BTW, I did follow Alephcat's instructions on how to get BBC and CNN video working, but I sacrificed the ability to see other video with MPlayer. I didn't know how to undo, so I reinstalled Mint.

That is odd, CNN works for me, what version of Mint are you using? Did you uncheck the "use Xvideo" box?